Thermopylae and Cannae: How One Battle Narrative Enriches Another

chapter 13 Thermopylae and Cannae: How One Battle Narrative Enriches Another

Mathieu de Bakker and Michiel van der Keur

1 Introduction*

When Tlepolemus, son of Heracles, and Sarpedon, son of Zeus, meet on the Trojan battlefield, the former refers to his father’s capture of Troy with only a handful of ships and comrades. Not intimidated, Sarpedon acknowledges Heracles’ just punishment of Priam’s father Laomedon, but announces that in contrast to the past, today’s victory will be Trojan. Indeed, when Zeus’ son and grandson throw their spears, Tlepolemus is mortally wounded (Hom. Il. 5.627– 5.662). The dialogue between the heroes illustrates that already in the oldest example of European literature, great battles do not stand on their own. They are conceptualized in terms of earlier famous battles, both by those who report them, and by those who are involved, although their outcome may be different: Tlepolemus is not able to repeat his father’s feat. The Greek historian Herodotus followed Homer in lowering a backdrop of precedents behind his narrative of the great battles of the Persian Wars. Some of these precedents took place on the very spot where the later battles were fought. In his description of the battle of Thermopylae, for instance, he refers to the earlier war between Phocians and Thessalians that led to the building of a wall across the entrance of the pass (Hdt. 7.176.4–7.176.5; 7.215). The Greeks decide to rebuild this wall to defend themselves against the Persians.1 Alterna- tively, Herodotus refers to earlier battles in the same campaign, such as in the case of Salamis, where he favourably compares the bravery of the Persians with their less glorious performance at Artemisium (Hdt. 8.86). Herodotus makes his characters, too, introduce past battles in their speeches. At Plataeae, for instance, the Athenians claim the honorific position on the wing with a ref- erence to their success against the Persians at Marathon (Hdt. 9.27.5–9.27.6).2

* We wish to thank the editors of this volume for their suggestions and directions, which much helped us in rewriting this paper and sharpening its arguments.We thank Hannah Kousbroek for correcting our English. 1 See in this volume the chapters by De Jong and De Bakker. 2 Herodotus also makes the Athenians and their opponents in the debate, the Arcadians, refer

Herodotus’ successor Thucydides ascribes similar claims to the Athenians, who mention Marathon and Salamis to exemplify their unconditional and dis- interested willingness to sacrifice themselves on behalf of the Greek commu- nity (Thuc. 1.73.4–1.73.5).3 In his own voice, Thucydides compares the crucial battle at Sphacteria to the events at Thermopylae (Thuc. 4.36.3) and likewise evokes the battle of Salamis when he describes the final Athenian stand in the great harbour of Syracuse (Thuc. 7.69.3–7.71).4 The Roman historian Livy wrote his narrative of the Hannibalic War, the greatest foreign threat to Rome in recent history, for an audience that had a good knowledge of earlier historiography, as most members of the Roman elite were schooled in a tradition of historical exempla that could be used as moral guidance and invoked in their speeches.5 It is not surprising, then, that in the preface of book 21, we encounter an allusion to Thucydides’ Histories in Livy’s claim that his war is ‘by far the most memorable of all those ever conducted’ (bellum maxime omnium memorabile quae umquam gesta sint, Liv. 21.1.1; compare Thuc. 1.1.1: ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων ‘most memorable compared to all earlier ones’) as no states had ever fought one another that were ‘healthier in terms of resources’ (ualidiores opibus, Liv. 21.1.2; compare Thuc. 1.1.1: ἀκμάζον- τές … ᾖσαν … ἀμφότεροι παρασκευῇ τῇ πάσῃ ‘they went (to war) at their peak in terms of all their resources’).6 In presenting the topos of the unprecedented magnitude of his subject, Livy places himself in the historiographical tradition of his Greek predecessors. In this chapter we take a closer look at the way in which he uses their works in shaping the narrative of the battle of Cannae. We hope to show that apart from scenes that are typical of any ancient war narrative, such as arduous river crossings and councils of war,7 the Cannae narrative evokes the Greek tra-

to older battles that were fought in a legendary past. The Athenians reject those in favour of their recent performance at Marathon. For a more in-depth discussion of this passage, see Flower & Marincola 2002: ad 9.27.1–9.27.6. See furthermore Grethlein 2006 for a similar use of the legendary past in the embassy scene at Gelon’s court (Hdt. 7.153–7.163). 3 In general Marathon becomes a lieu de mémoire throughout Greek literature, see Jung 2006. 4 See in this volume Rademaker. 5 These were primarily taken from their own past (see e.g. Van der Blom 2010: 12–17), but the Roman practitioners of historiography commonly rendered their national past with an eye on Greek history, too; see e.g. Wiseman 1979: 23–24; Momigliano 1990: 107. For more general literature on the Roman reception of the Greek historians, see Marincola 1997; Canfora 2006; Dillery 2009; O’Gorman 2009; and Samotta 2012. 6 For the topos, see Marincola 1997: 34–43, and for Livy’s use of Thucydides, Rodgers 1986, with 336 n. 6 referring to 21.1. 7 For a recent study of such structural conventions and topoi in battle descriptions in ancient historiography, see Lendon 2017a and 2017b.